Connie
The Covenant of Water, Abraham Verghese
From the New York Times-bestselling author of Cutting for Stone comes a stunning and
magisterial epic of love, faith, and medicine, set in Kerala, South India, following three
generations of a family seeking the answers to a strange secret.
Spanning the years 1900 to 1977, The Covenant of Water is set in Kerala, on India’s Malabar
Coast, and follows three generations of a family that suffers a peculiar affliction: in every
generation, at least one person dies by drowning—and in Kerala, water is everywhere. At the
turn of the century, a twelve-year-old girl from Kerala's Christian community, grieving the death
of her father, is sent by boat to her wedding, where she will meet her forty-year-old husband
for the first time. From this unforgettable new beginning, the young girl—and future matriarch,
Big Ammachi—will witness unthinkable changes over the span of her extraordinary life, full of
joy and triumph as well as hardship and loss, her faith and love the only constants.
A shimmering evocation of a bygone India and of the passage of time itself, The Covenant of
Water is a hymn to progress in medicine and to human understanding, and a humbling
testament to the hardships undergone by past generations for the sake of those alive today.
Imbued with humor, deep emotion, and the essence of life, it is one of the most masterful
literary novels published in recent years.
The Women, Kristin Hannah
- Goodreads Choice Award Winner for Readers' Favorite Historical Fiction (2024); Nominee for Readers' Favorite Audiobook (2024)
- A #1 bestseller on The New York Times, USA Today, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times!
From the celebrated author of The Nightingale and The Four Winds comes Kristin Hannah's The
Women―at once an intimate portrait of coming of age in a dangerous time and an epic tale of
a nation divided.
Women can be heroes. When twenty-year-old nursing student Frances “Frankie” McGrath
hears these words, it is a revelation. Raised in the sun-drenched, idyllic world of Southern
California and sheltered by her conservative parents, she has always prided herself on doing the
right thing. But in 1965, the world is changing, and she suddenly dares to imagine a different
future for herself. When her brother ships out to serve in Vietnam, she joins the Army Nurse
Corps and follows his path.
As green and inexperienced as the men sent to Vietnam to fight, Frankie is overwhelmed by the
chaos and destruction of war. Each day is a gamble of life and death, hope and betrayal;
friendships run deep and can be shattered in an instant. In war, she meets―and becomes one
of―the lucky, the brave, the broken, and the lost.
But war is just the beginning for Frankie and her veteran friends. The real battle lies in coming
home to a changed and divided America, to angry protesters, and to a country that wants to
forget Vietnam.
The Women is the story of one woman gone to war, but it shines a light on all women who put
themselves in harm’s way and whose sacrifice and commitment to their country has too often
been forgotten. A novel about deep friendships and bold patriotism, The Women is a richly
drawn story with a memorable heroine whose idealism and courage under fire will come to
define an era.
A Thread of Grace,
Mary Doria Russell - REREAD
Set in Italy during the dramatic finale of World War II, this new novel is the first in seven years
by the bestselling author of The Sparrow and Children of God.
It is September 8, 1943, and fourteen-year-old Claudette Blum is learning Italian with a suitcase
in her hand. She and her father are among the thousands of Jewish refugees scrambling over
the Alps toward Italy, where they hope to be safe at last, now that the Italians have broken with
Germany and made a separate peace with the Allies. The Blums will soon discover that Italy is
anything but peaceful, as it becomes overnight an open battleground among the Nazis, the
Allies, resistance fighters, Jews in hiding, and ordinary Italian civilians trying to survive.
Mary Doria Russell sets her first historical novel against this dramatic background, tracing the
lives of a handful of fascinating characters. Through them, she tells the little-known but true
story of the network of Italian citizens who saved the lives of forty-three thousand Jews during
the war’s final phase.
Katherine
Small Things Like These, Claire Keegan
MIA will offer tours based on this novel this season.
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
One of the most influential literary works of our time, One Hundred Years of Solitude remains a dazzling and original achievement by the masterful Gabriel García Márquez, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.
The story of the village of Macondo, as seen through the lives of seven generations of the Buendía family, is told with Marquez’s trademark mastery of magical realism. The founders, José Arcadio Buendía and Úrsula Iguarán, establish the village while camping on a riverbank, after José dreams about a "city of mirrors" that would reflect the world. The people of the town - which is solitary and disconnected from the outside world, save for a band of nomads that visits every year - experience extraordinary events across generations, until they are finally unable to hide from the newly independent government of Colombia.
Alternately reverential and comical, One Hundred Years of Solitude weaves the political, personal, and spiritual to bring a new consciousness to storytelling. The novel has been translated into dozens of languages, making it a classic of truly global proportions.
East of Eden, John Steinbeck - REREAD
In his journal, Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck called East of Eden "the first book," and indeed it has the primordial power and simplicity of myth. Set in the rich farmland of California's Salinas Valley, this sprawling and often brutal novel follows the intertwined destinies of two families—the Trasks and the Hamiltons—whose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel.
The masterpiece of Steinbeck’s later years, East of Eden is a work in which Steinbeck created his most mesmerizing characters and explored his most enduring themes: the mystery of identity, the inexplicability of love, and the murderous consequences of love's absence.
Adapted for the 1955 film directed by Elia Kazan introducing James Dean, and read by thousands as the book that brought Oprah’s Book Club back, East of Eden has remained vitally present in American culture for over half a century. This Centennial edition, specially designed to commemorate one hundred years of Steinbeck, features french flaps and deckle-edged pages.
Three Short Novels, Wendell Berry - REREAD
Kathy
Middlemarch, George Eliot 
Middlemarch, A Study of Provincial Life is a novel by English author George Eliot, the pen name of Mary Ann Evans. It appeared in eight paper-bound instalments from December 1871 to December 1872, with a book version in four volumes published in parallel (the first volume is dated 1871 and the other three are dated 1872).
Set in Middlemarch, a fictional English Midlands town, from 1829 to 1832, it follows distinct, intersecting stories with many characters. Issues include the status of women, the nature of marriage, idealism, self-interest, religion, hypocrisy, political reform, and education. Leavened with comic elements, Middlemarch approaches significant historical events in a realist mode: the Reform Act 1832, early railways, and the accession of King William IV. It looks at medicine of the time and reactionary views in a settled community facing unwelcome change. Eliot began writing the two pieces that formed the novel in 1869–1870 and completed it in 1871. Initial reviews were mixed but, seventy years later, it was considered as her best work and one of the great English novels.
Hannah Coulter, Wendell Berry
Adam Bede, George Eliot
Adam Bede was the first novel by English author George Eliot, pen name of Mary Ann Evans, first published in 1859. Eliot described the novel as "a country story full of the breath of cows and scent of hay".
The novel follows the lives of four characters in the fictional community of Hayslope—a rural, pastoral, and close-knit community—in 1799. The novel revolves around a love "rectangle" among the beautiful but self-absorbed Hetty Sorrel; Captain Arthur Donnithorne, the young squire who seduces her; Adam Bede, her unacknowledged suitor; and Dinah Morris, Hetty's cousin, a fervent, virtuous and beautiful Methodist lay preacher.
Old Jack, born just after the American Civil War and dying in contemporary times, spends one beautiful September day in Port William, his home since birth, remembering.
The Memory of Old Jack, Wendell Berry
The story tells of the most searing moments of Old Jack’s life, particularly his debt to his sister Nancy and her husband Ben Feltner, Old Jack’s model of what an honorable manhood and strength might be.
"Few novelists treat both their characters and their readers with the kind of respect that Wendell Berry displays in this deeply moving account . . . The Memory of Old Jack is a slab of rich Americana." ― The New York Times Book Review
Silence, Shusaku Endo (Maybe Classic - published in 1966)Seventeenth-century Japan: Two Portuguese Jesuit priests travel to a country hostile to their religion, where feudal lords force the faithful to publicly renounce their beliefs. Eventually captured and forced to watch their Japanese Christian brothers lay down their lives for their faith, the priests bear witness to unimaginable cruelties that test their own beliefs. Shusaku Endo is one of the most celebrated and well-known Japanese fiction writers of the twentieth century, and Silence is widely considered to be his great masterpiece.
A Heart So White, Javier Marias
Human Acts, Han Kang
Dandelion Wine, Ray Bradbury - CLASSIC
The summer of '28 was a vintage season for a growing boy. A summer of green apple trees, mowed lawns, and new sneakers. Of half-burnt firecrackers, of gathering dandelions, of Grandma's belly-busting dinner. It was a summer of sorrows and marvels and gold-fuzzed bees. A magical, timeless summer in the life of a twelve-year-old boy named Douglas Spaulding—remembered forever by the incomparable Ray Bradbury.
Steph
Explores themes about:
- the silence of God: The central emotional and spiritual question is why God remains silent while innocent people suffer terribly for their faith.
- Apostasy vs. True Compassion: Endō explores whether outwardly denying one's faith under duress is a cowardly betrayal or a supreme act of love and sacrifice for one's fellow human beings.
- The Cultural Soil of Japan: The novel reflects Endō's lifelong exploration of whether Western Christianity can take root in Japanese culture, or if the "swamp" of Japanese soil fundamentally alters or rejects it.
Made into a motion picture in 2016, directed by Martin Scorsese, and starring Adam Driver, Liam Neesan, and Andrew Garfield.
- Premio de la Critica de Narrative Castellana (1992)
- Dublin Literary Award (1997)
Secrecy—its possible convenience, its price, and even its civility—hovers throughout the novel. A Heart So White becomes a sort of anti-detective story of human nature. Intrigue; the sins of the father; the fraudulent and the genuine; marriage and strange repetitions of violence.
Marías elegantly sends shafts of inquisitory light into the shadows and on to the costs of ambivalence. ("My hands are of your colour; but I shame/To wear a heart so white"—Shakespeare's Macbeth.)
The Book of Ebenezer Le Page, G. B. EdwardsG. B. Edwards labored in obscurity all his life and completed The Book of Ebenezer Le Page shortly before his death. Published posthumously in 1981, the book is a triumph of the storyteller’s art that conjures up the extraordinary voice of a living man.
Renowned authors John Fowles and William Golding hailed it as a twentieth-century masterpiece for its authentic, powerful narrative voice.
Ebenezer Le Page, cantankerous, opinionated, and charming, is one of the most compelling literary creations of the late twentieth century. Eighty years old, Ebenezer has lived his whole life on the Channel Island of Guernsey, a stony speck of a place caught between the coasts of England and France yet a world apart from either. Ebenezer himself is fiercely independent, but as he reaches the end of his life he is determined to tell his own story and the stories of those he has known. He writes of family secrets and feuds, unforgettable friendships and friendships betrayed, love glimpsed and lost.
The Book of Ebenezer Le Page is a beautifully detailed chronicle of a life, but it is equally an oblique reckoning with the traumas of the twentieth century, as Ebenezer recalls both the men lost to the Great War and the German Occupation of Guernsey during World War II, and looks with despair at the encroachments of commerce and tourism on his beloved island.
- Nobel Prize in Literature, 2024
- Shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award • One of the Best Books of the Year: The Atlantic, San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, HuffPost, Medium, Library Journal
“[Han Kang’s] intense poetic prose . . . confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.”—The Nobel Committee for Literature, in the citation for the Nobel Prize
“Compulsively readable, universally relevant, and deeply resonant . . . in equal parts beautiful and urgent.”—The New York Times Book Review
Amid a violent student uprising in South Korea, a young boy named Dong-ho is shockingly killed.
The story of this tragic episode unfolds in a sequence of interconnected chapters as the victims and the bereaved encounter suppression, denial, and the echoing agony of the massacre.
From Dong-ho’s best friend who meets his own fateful end; to an editor struggling against censorship; to a prisoner and a factory worker, each suffering from traumatic memories; and to Dong-ho's own grief-stricken mother; and through their collective heartbreak and acts of hope is the tale of a brutalized people in search of a voice.
An award-winning, controversial bestseller, Human Acts is a timeless, pointillist portrait of an historic event with reverberations still being felt today, by turns tracing the harsh reality of oppression and the resounding, extraordinary poetry of humanity.
Not science fiction! Here's a sample of the text:
The facts about John Huff, aged twelve, are simple and soon stated.
- He could pathfind more trails than any Choctaw or Cherokee since time began.
- Could leap from the sky like a chimpanzee from a vine.
- Could live underwater two minutes and slide fifty yards downstream.
- Could hit baseballs into apple trees, knocking down harvests.
- Could jump six-foot orchard walls.
- Ran laughing.
- Sat easy.
- Was not a bully.
- Was kind.
- Knew the words to all the cowboy songs and would teach you if you asked.
- Knew the names of all the wild flowers and when the moon would rise or set and when the tides came in or out.
He was, in fact, the only god living in the whole of Green Town, Illinois, during the twentieth century that Douglas Spaulding knew of.
The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton
The House of Mirth is a tragedy about Lily Bart, a well-born but penniless young woman belonging to New York City's high society of the 1890s. Written by American author Edith Wharton, it came out October 14, 1905. The House of Mirth traces Lily's slow two-year social descent from privilege to a lonely existence on the margins of society as she fails to marry a man of wealth and status to secure her a place in affluent society. Wharton uses Lily, in critic Shari Benstock's words, as an attack on "an irresponsible, grasping and morally corrupt upper class."
Dracula, Bram Stoker - REREAD
There's a new audio production of Bram Stoker's Dracula. It has a full cast and an original soundtrack. This might be a fun way to re-read Dracula. We did a good job discussing Dracula when we read it. Its themes about outsiders and immigration continue to have relevance, of course.
This audio production is an "adaptation" so may not qualify for a book club read. Up to the group.
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